Prince Harry celebrates a vintage year at Sentebale

Prince Harry's charity Sentebale raised almost £2.5 million last year

Prince Harry dances with children earlier this year during at visit to the Kananelo Centre for the deaf, a project supported by his charity Sentebale, in Maseru, Lesotho.Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Tim Walker

7:15AM BST 22 Apr 2013

While the Duchess of Cambridge has proved invaluable to the charities of which she is patron, Prince Harry is showing that he is also worth his weight in gold to good causes.

Mandrake can disclose that the Prince has helped to increase income at Sentebale, his charity for African orphans, to almost £2.5 million last year. The organisation, whose name means “forget me not” in Sesotho, raised £2.41 million in the 12 months to September 2012, an increase of £325,000 on 2011.

In January last year, I reported that Harry, 28, had led a major shake-up at Sentebale which saw its colourful chief executive, Kedge Martin, depart, to be replaced by the Number Two at the charity giant Oxfam. “I am delighted that Cathy Ferrier has agreed to join us,” said Philip Green, the chairman of Sentebale. “She can really take the charity to the next level.”

Ferrier’s appointment stunned colleagues in the charity world, as she had given up her role at Oxfam, which enjoys an income of £385.5 million and has 5,175 employees in Britain alone. By contrast, Sentebale has just 23 staff, according to its latest accounts.

In a further sign of the Prince’s ambitions for the charity, he persuaded Baroness Chalker, who was for eight years the overseas development minister, to join the board.

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Sentebale spent £653,000 on staffing costs, compared with £462,000 in 2011 when it had four fewer employees. The 2012 costs include “non-recurrent costs associated with management changes”.

A man of parts

One of the lesser-known skills of Patrick Garland, the great theatre director who died over the weekend at the age of 78, was his gift for mimicry. He could, for instance, do a most convincing Edward Fox.

I recall Garland telling me how Niamh Cusack, when she appeared with Sir Rex Harrison in a troubled West End production of The Admirable Crichton, asked Fox if she should offer the show’s irascible star her views on how he should play one of their scenes together.

Garland captured Fox’s “I wouldn’t do that if I were you” perfectly, and his rendering, too, of Sir Rex’s subsequent explosion when Cusack chose to ignore the advice was a joy to behold. Garland, incidentally, managed to survive working with Sir Rex himself when he directed him in a celebrated Broadway revivial of My Fair Lady.